So this weekend was a bit more low-key than I'd anticipated. In fact, I never wore my cobbled-together Halloween costume. Probably for the best.

Since there was no predicting how exciting Friday and Saturday would be, I'm not especially disappointed: I've decided to play up the "nice break" angle.

On Friday I drove over to the Cities and hung out with Graham and (to a lesser extent) Manney.

Both of whom made me feel like a hardcore Republican for declaring myself a Kerry-leaning "undecided" and parroting a Slate story about some suspiciously old news. Offhand, I'd credit their reaction to group polarization on the relatively liberal Hamline campus.

Though I was surprised, I wasn't offended. I'm used to debating with those two.

But I worry that I'm becoming intolerant.

Religiously intolerant, mostly. I try to be cynical about my own religion ("He believes in No-God, and he worships him"), but atheism is the know-it-all of religious views. It seems unassailable, built as it is on a foundation of skepticism. From this height, I survey the ranks of the devout with a mixture of bemusement and dismay.

I'd say that my rightness, based in reason, is better than their righteousness, based in superstition and faith, but in its effects there's little difference between my intolerance and religiously-based intolerance. Moments before mocking Manney for believing in some vague higher power, I realized I'd let my convictions go to my head.

(Images of Pierre, the lost frenchman of London, dutifully checking his convictions for intellectual deadwood. Who am I to show him Londres?)

I wonder at the fortitude with which Jubb has handled some of my harsher blasphemy — the sort of abuse I never had to deal with as a Catholic. Very christian of him, as they say.

Saturday, that's right. One odd thing about Saturday is that, when ten of us ate at Perkins that night, no one was a vegetarian. Sometimes it seems like half the U-frisbee team is crazy-vegetarians.

I probably would've flaked had I realized how far Winona is from the Cities, but since I had nothing better to do at that point (Graham was at work), I drove the two hours and kept my word.

Realizing I had no desire to watch my fellow Lawrentians play, I stopped at a rest stop halfway there and read all of my Wired, and about half of Penguin Island, to kill time.

Didn't do much there, either. Ate dinner with the team, watched bits of An American Werewolf in Paris, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Psycho as well as the entirety of a terrible movie called Bones, and got a brief glimpse of the U-frisbee dynamic.

There was a 21+ party at some bar, but I opted out. Drove back on Sunday morning with Alan and ended up talking politics for the most part. A fun enough weekend.

Tired now, and anxious to sleep in my own bed.